Right from the first day I booted up my computer and decided I was going to write for a living, I’ve had a certain productivity target in mind, that being 52 articles a year, or one a week.

That’s quite the target, and to be fair, I did write 100 articles/fillers/etc in my first year in the business, but that was more when I was a writer doing business, technology and fitness writing (I was, in addition, a staff writer at the time), so it doesn’t really count.

From the time I became a journalist though, which meant primary research, a few sources per story and typically 700-2,000 words of text, I’ve never quite achieved that goal. I don’t quite know how many pieces I’ve been doing per year (somewhere in the range of 20-30, most likely) but last year I hit 46. Seeing as the first six months of the year were quite lean, I can confidently say that I wrote at one to two pieces a week, over the last six months of 2009.

The number of pieces written per week or month or year, by itself, is not measure of anything, except maybe how prolific you are. And that’s been a consideration for me. I’ve wanted to be prolific, to have a large body of work, but in addition to that, I’ve really wanted to achieve this goal in order to increase the speed of my production. I considered myself a slow writer, and part of it was that it’s easy to sit around and mope about lack of sources and research when you have a month to finish a piece. However, if you have a three-day deadline, you still manage to find sources, get the research done, and write quality words somehow, but much quicker. At least I do.

I think speed is important, because that’s one of the things that allows you to maximize your time and potential. That’s not to say that the quality of the work isn’t important– it absolutely is and should be the first consideration. What I’m saying is that it’s essential to work at a good speed while maintaining that quality. At some point you have to stop researching, stop obsessively checking Facebook, and start the writing.

I write on this blog almost every day. Sure, sometimes it falls by the wayside when I have too many deadlines piled up or if I’m off on holiday, but for the most part, I do get it done. Do I always have things to say? Do words come easily to me every day as I sit down to write the next day’s entry? Nope. But I do it anyway, because for me, it’s a practice in getting my butt in the chair and getting something written.

Without a deadline, I’m useless. I suspect most of us are.

Of course, a New Yorker article is going to take months to write and an article I write for a newspaper takes no more than two or three days, and over the last year, there have been pieces that have taken me a month or more to research and put together, and there have been others that I’ve written in half a day. The difference, though, is that two years ago, those same half-a-day articles would have taken me weeks, simply because my editors gave me longer deadlines and I wasn’t doing news-based work. I think my speed has increased substantially because of the pressure of time I’ve had over the last few months.

In the last year, specifically because of the recession, I’ve really worked hard to make sure that I can do a good job in the fastest manner possible so that I’m not skimping on research or quality, but at the same time am making more per hour or per day.

Do other writers write like this? I’ve known newspaper journalists to crank out copy this fast, but not really any freelancers. I find it hard to sustain this pace and I fear I may start burning out soon, especially since I now have a contracted pieces per month from certain clients. The work is good to have though. I’m very grateful for that.

What do you think? What’s your magic number?